If development is an aspiration, then culture is the historical sediment underlying this aspiration. Culture conveys humanity’s intersecting bonds and the kinds of rituals, practices, and representations that make up its ways of life. Development—conceived narrowly as income growth or broadly as ways in which people participate to achieve well-being—is heavily influenced by this sense of bonding and group-ness. Culture is literally the way humanity recognizes itself and reveals its aspirations.

The food we eat is an important part of culture. It is also an expression of community identity. As American folklorist Millie Rahn writes, The kitchen, historically, is the place where families gather and where the everyday and the ceremonial meet and overlap. Here families interact and share private traditions, expressing identity through their food to each other and to the world. Creativity is alive in this space, from daily mealtimes to more elaborate feasts that mark rites of passage, religious and secular holidays, and other special events. This is where knowledge is passed on, from traditional ways of preparing and using various ingredients, implements, tools, and techniques to legends, stories, anecdotes, and cultural exchanges that have become part of familial and regional folklife. We all eat, and associate different layers of cultural meaning to the food we consume. Explorations of food, then, can be an easy conduit into the complex world of intangible cultural heritage. This article gives several examples from the safeguarding initiatives of the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador that have used foodways as a means to get people thinking about, and engaged with, concepts of cultural transmission and heritage conservation.

The birth of a child is considered auspicious and sacred in every culture. India, being multicultural in its beliefs and customs, has diverse traditions of local cuisines at all occasions, be it childbirth, or even death. Although the recipes have grown in number as a result of shared practices in modern times, traditional food items and their variants are still popular and can be found in almost all mandatory rituals.

Lunar month festival of the Mongols or holiday celebration of the first day of “White Moon” or “White Month” symbolizes the departure of winter and welcoming the spring of the new year. This festival and its rituals and traditions are unique and naturally accorded with a specific lifestyle of Mongolian nomadic culture. Therefore, during this festival, there are no gatherings of masses on the street to participate in folk parades and street carnivals as in urban cities and villages.

he upheaval and extinction faced by traditional culture is a core issue in today’s world. It has brought us to the realization that we are living in an important transition period where the future of humanity will be determined. In particular, the advent of digital platforms has provided a communication channel to link people together; the importance of these platforms seems poised to become much greater. In this era, in which means of communication are facing remarkable qualitative changes, oral tradition is under considerable threat. In past eras where humankind created languages and memories to resolve all kinds of issues and share information, speech was a way to achieve totality. Through speech, people delivered their thoughts and opinions, created new things, and embraced differences to become one. As such, spoken language became an absolute means and solution to maximize the immense capacity of humankind. People discovered interests and meanings through conversations; they combined work and enjoyment by singing; they wore masks and gave movement-based performances accompanied by amusing anecdotes. By reciting and dedicating bonpuri, a ritual song to pray to deities and receive oracles, their creations became content passed down through oral culture.

"The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (‘ICH Convention’ or ‘Convention’ hereafter) was adopted in 2003 and subsequently brought into force in 2006. The ICH Convention mandates signatories to use or mobilise various measures to safeguard intangible cultural heritage. \nEven though the Convention does not succinctly mention the elaborate legal measures for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage, the intellectual property rights to protect intangible cultural heritage and its holders are implied throughout provisions of the Convention. To implement the Convention’s spirit, the Operational Directives clarify legal form as safeguarding measures by stating that: State Parties shall endeavor to ensure, in particular through the application of intellectual property rights, privacy rights and any other appropriate form of legal protection, that the rights of the communities, groups, and individuals that create, bear and transmit their intangible cultural heritage are duly protected…."

In December 2011, Rumah Angklung was founded by a group of young people who loved and cared about the Angklung (a traditional Indonesian musical instrument) and finally had the initiative to create a community. That community is now a serious foundation committed to preserving and developing Indonesian art and culture, especially related to angklung.

The information society built on the development of information and communication technology (ICT) is bringing about revolutionary change to humanity, such as the smooth dissemination of knowledge and information, promotion of communication, and an enhanced quality of living even if accompanied by other negative effects. Growing access to the internet is completely revising the very meaning of information services, thus creating a new environment. The possibilities of networking, mutual cooperation, and digitization created in this environment is effecting fundamental change in the functions of information acquisition, storage, and dissemination.\nSuch development in ICT presents new approaches in the field of cultural heritage as well. The appropriate utilization of ICT in the safeguarding and promotion of ICH is inspiring hope for a whole new ICH safeguarding system, going beyond traditional methods. Making ICH-related knowledge and information more accessible and usable to a larger public through ICT will contribute to ICH safeguarding and cultural diversity.

Arts-ED is a Malaysian non-profit organization operating out of George Town, Penang, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It aims to provide innovative community-based arts and culture education in both rural and urban communities. With programs focusing on the arts, culture, and heritage, Arts-ED uses creative educational approaches that encourage learning around real issues.

Efforts for the sustainable development of human cultures, which is defined by UNESCO as its most important goal, have already affected our lives in many ways. Among others, the inheritance and development of ICH are considered unique to humanity and the quintessence of human life. Education plays a vital role in the process of cultural inheritance and development. In particular, the experiences and education we receive during elementary school as young members of a future generation have a critical and meaningful influence on our lives. The significance of ICH education for the sustainable development of humanity is evidently underlined in UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and its Operational Directives.

My initial research among Lach community in Lac Duong town, Lam Dong province, Vietnam started with my participation in a project entitled “Establishment of associated mechanisms for conservation of landscape biodiversity and cultural space in Lang Biang Biosphere Reserve, Vietnam,” headed by Southern Institute of Ecology (Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology) in 2016. The project was successful to some extent in documenting characteristics of cultural spaces of ethnic peoples in the region and the reality of these spaces’ conservation in close relationship with that of biodiversity. Noticeably, being a world heritage, gongs cultural space was recognized as one of the crucial elements constituting the entire cultural spaces and cultural identity of local ethnic groups in the region and thus recorded as being imperative for conservative strategies and actions. These preliminary conceptualizations attracted me as an anthropologist to explore further insights into the socio-economic and cultural life of the Lach in the context of their daily life from 2017 to 2018. \n\nAs the people have been taking more active parts in their national and international integration, their social and economic spaces get expanded, adjusted and re-created. So are their cultural spaces in general and gongs cultural space in specific. This paper is to explore local gongs clubs of the Lach in Lac Duong town and gongs culture restoration activities at the parish church of Langbiang to reveal the fact that gongs cultural spaces of the Lach are far from static, fixed and in need of reservation. Rather, they are dynamic, inclusive and on the process of continuous meaning making as the result of the people utilizing their agency in creating initiatives and mechanism to practice their culture and transfer it to next generations. It is implied that by ways of local participation and community based training, cultural heritage can be prolonged and perpetuated itself alive.

The Masion des Cultures du Monde (World Cultures Institute) The Maison des Cultures du Monde (“World Cultures Institute”), has been founded in 1982 in Paris by Chérif Khaznadar and Françoise Gründ with the support of the French ministry of Culture. Its goals, the promotion and the enhancement of world performing arts - as witnesses of human inventiveness, \n\n- as landmarks of a historical continuity - as factors of cultural diversity \n- as sources of inspiration and creative renewal. Its method: the on-stage presentation of musical, dramatic, choreographic and ritual expressions from all over the world and mostly unknown to the French public. Since the creation of the United Nations, a new vision emerged that international solidarity should be based on the knowledge of other cultures and on a “dialogue of cultures”. In France several initiatives were conducted such as : - the Theatre of Nations with the support of UNESCO\n- foreign cultural seasons such as the Year of India, the Year of China, the Year of Korea, the Year of Vietnam etc. \n- a Traditional Arts Festival which promoted world traditional arts in a spirit of open-mindedness, awareness raising, aesthetic pleasure and cultural enrichment.